


Automaton

by TW Lewis (gardendoor)



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-01-08
Updated: 2004-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 05:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardendoor/pseuds/TW%20Lewis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joe uncovers a secret that could destroy both the Watchers and the Immortals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Automaton

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimers: Methos and Joe are not mine. If they were, they would have gotten their own frigging series instead of Amanda.

_Each spake bittere and full sore  
Of auld ones who had gone before_

Joe walked down the stairs to the archives, still shaking his head. The four Horsemen were real, and Methos had been one of them! Incredible. Horrible, but incredible. There was so much Joe could never have foreseen learning and doing when he joined the Watchers.

Hence this midnight trip to the archives. Ancient languages were not Joe’s strongest suit, but he was burning with curiosity to look through the older records, the ones that hadn’t yet been compiled onto the computer, for early references to Methos. Asking the old man himself would be a lost cause; Methos would swear he was ‘just a guy’ until he was blue in the face. But the archives were another matter.

Joe quickened his pace as he passed the rows of steel filing cabinets and approached the climate controlled manuscript room. His cane clicked on the cement, signaling his approach to Marty, the night clerk, who waved him through without looking up.

Joe decided to start with the NKHD folio, a tattered sixth century vellum recopying of a Phoenician tablet. It chronicled the life of the monk whom Darius killed, who was reputed to be even older than Methos. Surely that ancient one had known Methos in his early years. An added advantage was that, as a recopying, it had a Greek translation next to the Phoenician characters. Even a fieldworker like Joe learned Latin and Greek as a matter of course in basic training.

But as he carefully turned the brittle vellum pages, Joe frowned. The manuscript had been decrepit when Joe last viewed it twenty years ago, but surely it hadn’t been this far gone! Thirteen of the thirty pages were completely unreadable, so worm-eaten and water-stained that no whole words were left. The remaining pages showed nowhere near as much wear-and-tear, and the thirteen pages were not together, they were scattered throughout. What could have disintegrated those six pages without affecting the pages next to them?

A sneaking suspicion crept into Joe’s mind. He replaced the folio under glass and looked for the LLT folio, the oldest record of the Immortal who had been a sacred prostitute of Ishtar and an alleged lover of Methos more than four thousand years ago.

Half the references to Methos were worm-eaten or smudged beyond recognition, and three pages had been so edited that they fell apart like lace under Joe’s fingertips. One page looked fine, until Joe recognized Adam’s lilting handwriting in the supposedly ancient letters.

Joe was shaking with rage now. “Marty!” he snapped. He was damned if he was going to cover for Adam.

Marty rushed over. “What is it, Joe?”

“I’ll admit, I don’t work here. But do you remember this folio being such a wreck? The NKHD is even worse.”

Marty winced. “I know. Don Saltzer borrowed those from the collection. When Adam returned them to us after Saltzer’s death, he said Kalas had wrecked the manuscripts to torture Don, make him talk. You know how protective Don was of these books. Kalas cost us so much.”

Joe’s fists clenched. “Don was a good friend.”

“He was a good friend of mine, too. He spent half his life down here. No one knew these books as well as he did.”

Joe turned and left the archives, too angry to speak. Adam had wrecked the Methos Chronicles beyond all repair now; destroyed any evidence he didn’t like, ‘discovered’ new legends when he wanted to embellish his stories. The clack of the cane mocked his slowness, and he quickened his pace, remembering another time he’d confronted the man he’d called friend…  


*****

 _Two years ago:_

Breaking into Methos’s apartment was surprisingly easy, considering how long it had been since Joe had to pick a lock. Once inside, Joe looked around the apartment with new eyes.

Abstract metal sculptures made the stark white apartment look like a gallery. The CD rack was filled with Springstein, Queen, Nirvana, and that new superstar, Byron. Why had Joe never wondered why someone fascinated enough with the past to know fifteen dead languages lived in an apartment so rooted in the present? Why hadn’t he seen that Adam Pierson was a sham?

Adam Pierson was Methos. The rookie Watcher who teased Joe and Don Saltzer mercilessly about joining the computer age was really the oldest, most mysterious son-of-a-bitch on record.

Just then, Methos walked in. “Something I can do for you, Joe?” he asked, his voice the perfect blend of cheerfulness, innocence and caution.

Rage, betrayal and grief boiled over. _I thought you were my friend. How could you lie to me for all those years? Are you laughing inside at how easy it was to trick me?_ Finally Joe snapped, “Do you actually listen to any of these CDs, or do you just go out and buy what all the kids are buying?”

Methos blinked. “Let me get this straight, Joe, you broke into my apartment so you could ask me whether I like the music I buy?” He got two beers from the fridge, angling himself so he never turned his back to Joe. Normally he would have tossed Joe the second beer, but this time he slid it to him across the countertop, visibly wary of making sudden moves. Joe watched Methos silently until the Immortal finally frowned at him and said, “Yes, I buy music I like. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Were you ever going to tell me, or did you have fun putting one over on the pathetic Watcher?” asked Joe.

Methos took another swig of beer. “When exactly was I supposed to tell you, Joe? ‘Hi, Mr. Dawson, it’s a pleasure meeting you; by the way, I’m the oldest living Immortal. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’”

“We’ve known each other for eight years, you could have brought it up sometime.” said Joe, matching Methos sarcasm for sarcasm.

“Look, I haven’t told anyone that I was Methos in more than two thousand years! It’s nothing personal, Joe. If it wasn’t for this whole mess with Kalas, MacLeod wouldn’t know either.” He finished his beer, threw the bottle in the garbage can across the room and opened the beer Joe hadn’t touched.

“You could have told me you were an Immortal,” said Joe.

“All right, let’s assume I’m a suicidal megalomaniac. Like I said, when was I supposed to tell you? By the time we were friends, I knew you were the Watchers’ poster boy. You’d never betray your oath and keep my secret. Then there were all the rumors about your brother-in-law. And when you finally shocked the hell out of me by confronting MacLeod, you were still helping Horton, protecting that sick bastard while you made friends with MacLeod. How the hell was I supposed to figure out which side of the fence you were sitting on?”

“I killed Horton a year ago, Methos. And you still lied to me.”

“Like I said, I’m not a suicidal megalomaniac. I never tell mortals WHAT I am, and I never tell Immortals WHO I am. I was going to fake my death in a couple of years and move on. You know how it is, you have records of enough Immortals. How many of them tell even their dearest friends what they are? How many of them stay in one place, in one identity, very long? Why tell someone what you are when you’re only going to know them for ten years before you move on?”

The words were very convincing. But Joe took in the whole effect: the rant, the harmless bluster, the eyes that showed frustration but no real fear or anger. “Stop playing ‘Adam Pierson, mild-mannered grad student’. At least give me that much credit. You can fool MacLeod with that crap, but you can’t fool me.”

That got him. Methos stared at his shoes for a long moment. “You and your mortal naivete, thinking friendship means letting down all your barriers.”

Joe looked at him to be sure he understood what Methos was saying. “You weren’t pretending to be Adam just to fool me. You were Adam because you needed a fresh start.”

Adam’s dark, hollow eyes were all the confirmation Joe needed. He’d seen that look on a hundred veterans’ faces, including his own in the mirror. Joe wouldn’t ask any further.

*****

 _Present day:_

Methos was home this time, packing and arguing on a cellular phone, but when he saw Joe at the door he mumbled an excuse and hung up. “Hey Joe. I don’t suppose MacLeod’s calmed down any?”

“You son of a bitch.”

“Joe?” Methos involuntarily took a step back.

“You destroyed the Chronicles! You cut them up and rewrote them! You want to hide out for a decade or two, fine, you can pretend to be a Watcher, but you can’t expect me to sit still while you destroy everything I stand for!”

Methos kept backing up to avoid Joe’s fury until he fell backwards onto the couch, looking up with wide eyes.

“Don’t give me that ‘helpless and overwhelmed’ crap,” Joe snarled. “I know you too well. You perverted the Chronicles. Five thousand years of continuity, of human achievement, and now we can’t trust any of it.”

And now helplessness turned to defensiveness. “It’s my life!” said Methos. “I don’t pry into your secrets, Joe; I let you choose what to share with me. Why should MY life be out on display?”

“Because you’re Immortal. Because you’re the living embodiment of every culture in human history, and we need to understand you to understand ourselves. Because if you’re the last son of a bitch left, we need to know what’s going to happen to us mere mortals and prepare for it.”

“Don’t quote Stephen Godfrey at me, Joe Dawson, I took his class too.” Methos took a deep breath, seeming calmer. “I want you to tell me why when the two of us are sitting around boozing and I ask you about your first love, you can deflect the question with a joke, but when you want to know about mine all you have to do is go to the library and look it up. You wanted answers to questions you couldn’t ask me as a friend, or knew I didn’t want to answer, and you decided to go over my head. You never would have found out what I had done if you hadn’t tried to invade my privacy.”

“Don’t turn this around on me, Methos. You destroyed something we can never get back.”

“If I was the least bit sorry about that, I wouldn’t have destroyed them in the first place.”

Joe shook his head in disgust. “I put up with a lot of crap from you guys because I thought we were friends. But you crossed the line, Methos. In the morning I’m going to make a full report to the Council. The Watchers have your picture on file; you’ll never be able to infiltrate us again. It’s over.”

Methos froze. “You can’t do that. They’ll hunt me down.”

“I’m giving you a head start. For years, the Watchers, our mission, was all that got me out of bed in the morning. I owe them more than sitting on my thumbs while you make everything we stand for meaningless.”

“Joe, we’re friends, you can’t--”

“You are NOT my friend.” said Joe. “I’ll leave the house around nine tomorrow and be at Watcher Headquarters by ten. That gives you until ten-thirty.” He walked out, leaning heavily on his cane.

*****

 _Ten years ago:_

Adam Pierson dug into the pocket of his jeans and checked the address again. This was his second day as Don Saltzer’s trainee, and the chronicler had sent him to talk to Joe Dawson. Dawson, to quote Saltzer, was “A damn fine fieldworker.” Saltzer wanted his young researcher to get a sense for fieldwork before he dedicated himself to research. “At worst, you’ll know the difficulties of fieldwork, and what to expect and draw from the data we have on various Immortals.”

Adam walked into the bookstore, smiling at the bearded man who approached him, leaning on a cane. “Can I help you, son?”

Adam instantly took stock of the man. He looked like he was in his forties, and had a hard life. He wore a suit that was well made, but done by hand, and not by a tailor. Yet he wore it with the grace of one who depends heavily on their pride to get through the day. Adam was willing to bet that the man had no one to come home to, nothing in his life but the job. But despite the harsh life, there were smile lines around the man’s mouth and eyes, and a cocky authority in his walk.

“Yeah, I’m looking for a fieldworker named Joe Dawson?” Adam replied, looking past the man to the back of the shop, searching for the operative. “Is he here?”

The man chuckled. “You’re looking at him, son.”

Adam did a double take and had the bad manners to blush. After 5000 years, few things surprised him. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Adam.”

“Don’s new trainee?” Joe checked Adam’s wrist to make sure. “Good to meet you. Don said you’d be stopping by. Do you want to get started?”

“Um, sure.” Adam was still trying to salvage the situation, though it looked like Joe didn’t hold his surprise against him.

“All right then. Did Don tell you anything about my assignment?”

“Duncan MacLeod, he said.” Adam tried to think if there had been anything else. “He’s out of the game, right?”

“Almost. He still has a few fights, when he can’t avoid it.” Joe walked back to the room that had the computer. “He tends to move between here and Paris, but not often. He’s also very predictable. I can practically write the report before he meets an Immortal. That leaves me free to focus on the details. He’s had a girlfriend named Tessa Noel for the past six years, it looks like he’ll be with her until she dies. Even his taste in women is predictable, he might as well have had the same two women for the past four hundred years. The ‘short terms’ are always pretty and a little spacey, completely hedonistic. The ‘long terms’ are always passionate,” Joe chuckled a little, “independent, strong women. He’s a complete boy scout, adopts people and takes care of them. But his women tend to take care of themselves. Maybe he needs the challenge, maybe it’s a relief. We don’t know.”

Adam looked at the computer. “A boy scout Immortal?” He scrolled down the file. “All right, I’m starting to see what you mean.” He scrolled down a little further. “This is going to give me a sugar overdose.”

“You’re too young to be a cynic,” said Joe. “Besides, you need something to believe in.”

Adam shrugged. “Don’t believe in people, Joe; they disappoint you every time. And gods are even worse. Just take care of yourself and let the rest of the world go to hell.”

“I guess I’m just a romantic,” Joe replied with a low laugh. “All right, let’s get started. You’re going to tail MacLeod with me for the day.”

Nine hours later, everything hurt. Joe had pushed him hard, used every trick in the book to make Adam catch up with him, both mentally and physically: sudden questions and quizzes, catching a taxi and leaving Adam to get his own, picking perches only big enough for one. But finally they watched MacLeod and Tessa come home from their night on the town and go to bed. Just as things were getting interesting, Joe said, “Not bad for your first day in the field.”

“First?” Adam echoed with a sense of dread.

“He gets up at six. I’ll meet you here.” He smiled at Adam. “You’re going to make a damn good Watcher.”

When Don Saltzer said it, Methos always smiled at his private joke. Now, after nearly killing himself trying to keep up with Joe, he felt he’d earned the praise. “Thank you, Mr. Dawson. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The older Watcher smiled. “You can call me Joe.”

*****

 _Present Day:_

Adam snarled as he tried to shove all his possessions into suitcases. Only a few hours before Joe had barged in and picked a fight, Adam had killed Silas and knelt with Cassandra’s sword at his throat, ready to die for his past crimes. And just when he’d thought he was paid up, that he was done living with old blood on his hands, in came Joe screaming at him for deleting the record of his first and oldest crime. It was too much for one night.

Sometimes he felt like a sequoia, one of those enormous trees out in California. Rings inside, layers marking off moments of history. An Adam-ring going back to the birth of Jesus: ‘just a guy’, passive, cowardly, harmless. He’d had no clue as to how to atone for his sins, so he’d settled for doing and being nothing. Then a Methos-ring going back to the birth of the written word: Methos the legend. Methos the god. A man of power who took what he wanted and burned the rest to ash. A man of hidden rage and desperation borne of yet an earlier time. Methos was a hard enough ring to admit to. But deeper still, before he’d taken a name meaning ‘myth’ and the mantle of a god, he’d been something else. The deepest ring of all, the rotted heart of the tree: an abandoned child, slave of a forgotten race. He had committed a grave sin then, in his anger and loss. But at least there were only two living souls who remembered that time, who knew the depth of his sin. Who knew that the Gathering and the Game were lies. And those two weren’t talking.

Even if he could admit the truth to Joe, he knew it wouldn’t make things any easier. Either way, everything Joe stood for was rotten underneath.

The suitcase was crammed too full to close. When had he stopped packing light? When had he started caring again? He was tired of running from himself, from Kronos, and now from Joe. This was the first time he’d felt alive since he left Byron, the first time in five thousand years that he felt alive without giving in to the perverse power-lust that had made him a Horseman. He didn’t want to run again. He didn’t want to lose Mac and Joe. He didn’t want to lose himself.

His hands slid away from the suitcase. He turned, pulled on his coat, and walked out into the night.

Joe opened the door when he knocked, a gun in his hand. “I’m not here to kill you, Joe,” said Methos. “Can I come in?”

Joe thought for a moment, then opened the door to admit Methos, though he kept the gun.

Methos flopped into his favorite of Joe’s armchairs, the new suede one. Joe took the older one across from it. “Something you want to tell me, or is this a social call?” Joe asked, affecting a Southern accent for bite.

Methos leaned forward, staring at his hands, then looked up at Joe. “This doesn’t leave this room. Don’t tell the Watchers, and especially don’t tell other Immortals.” Joe made no promises, just sat there watching him, but Methos continued. “I deleted parts of five chronicles in total. Most of them meant nothing by themselves, but the sum, the sum is damning. Do you know why we can’t fight on holy ground?”

Joe blinked at the abrupt change of topic. “It’s against the rules.”

“Yes, but why is it against the rules?”

“There are legends of Immortals breaking that rule and triggering something when one took the other’s head. Supposedly that’s what happened to Pompeii.”

“But how does it work? Does God strike down the blasphemers? If a Wiccan Immortal were to throw salt at me and mumble a prayer as I approached, do you think that would make the place holy ground and instantly prevent me from fighting her? Let’s put it another way: Why, in the ancient world, did so many religions build their temples and churches on the ruins of older shrines?”

“You’re saying there’s something about the sites themselves, something that reacts to Immortals whether or not human religions have consecrated the sites,” said Joe slowly.

Methos nodded. “It’s a network of energy that spans the earth called ley lines. Wherever the lines meet is a nexus, and ancient people tended to set up shrines at those places of power. And when we’re found as babies, it’s always at those nodes. The accounts tend to take this for granted because unwanted babies were usually abandoned at church doors for most of the last two thousand years.”

Joe sat back, his eyes wide as he drank in this information. “You’re saying that these ley lines have something to do with how Immortals are created.”

“Bright boy.” Methos twisted his hands. “Now the hard part. There is no such thing as the Game or the Gathering.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Of course there is!”

“No. I made them both up. There are only three living Immortals who still know the truth, including me.”

The full horror of it dawned. “You’re saying all those deaths, all those centuries of Immortals killing each other, it was all for nothing? Just some sick joke?”

“It wasn’t a joke. I was angry, confused, I was only a hundred and fifty back then. The other begged me to stop, but I kept telling the new Immortals that they had to defend themselves and chop each other’s heads off if they wanted to achieve their destiny.”

“And the other didn’t try to stop you?”

“They tried to talk to the younger Immortals, but if you’ve already heard that other Immortals are trying to kill you, would you trust one who tells you to put down your weapon? Most of the older ones were killed in the first wave, the rest either went along or fled to holy ground and tried to preach peace from there.”

“The monk Darius killed was one of them, wasn’t he?” asked Joe.

“When Darius killed him, he knew the truth, but he also knew there was no way he could convince other Immortals, so he framed all his arguments for the futility of war in terms they could better understand. He told me once that tactic turned out to be a blessing, because those same arguments could convince mortals to turn away from war. He saved more lives that way.”

“Did he know who you were? What you’d done?”

Methos nodded. “He knew.”

Joe heaved himself out of his chair and went to fix himself a drink. He downed it in two gulps, then fixed himself another. “So if there’s no Gathering,” he asked, his voice harsh with more than alcohol, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Methos paused now, his throat tight. He hadn’t talked about this in almost two thousand years, and never with an outsider. “They came from the stars. We never knew from where. They made their summer palace in the Indus Valley, set themselves up as gods and lived among the humans. Terrible, beautiful creatures. They harnessed the living power of this world to make themselves servants, automatons made of flesh that could pass for human. We were their whores, their librarians, their bodyguards, and their overseers. We could recognize others of our kind by the energy that powered them, and recognize whether they were of our house or that of a competitor. Even today, Gathering and all, even the blood-thirstiest Immortals will form fast friendships with Immortals they’ve just met, for no reason they can fathom, or start fights with Immortals who have done nothing to provoke them. Subconsciously they recognize a friendly or unfriendly signature. And that’s why we can’t have children. We’re just sterile machines made of flesh. We’re not human. Not even close.”

He couldn’t bear to look at Joe, he just stared at his hands, twisting them in his lap. “They used us as pawns in their little power games, had us kill each other to absorb the information and power of each other’s servants. But we believed. We believed they loved us and that everything was as it was supposed to be. And then raiders came, human barbarians. They could have defeated the raiders with their technology, but why spend all that money and risk getting hurt when they could just move their summer palace to another planet? They abandoned us without a thought. They didn’t even turn off the bloody generators, so the nexuses kept spitting out bright new servants with no masters. And I felt so angry, so gullible, and the only way I could vent that anger was to prove someone else was even more gullible than I was. At first I just made myself feel better by spreading the lies, but then one of the Immortals I had tricked came back to me and offered me a chance to live like a god. That’s how Kronos convinced me to become a Horseman. I could be as powerful as the ones who abandoned me. I could be master.”

He fell silent, and all he could hear were the cars going by outside. He ventured a look up at Joe, and Joe’s horror and revulsion made Methos duck his head down again. Joe limped over to stand by the window. “What the hell do you expect me to do with this?”

“Don’t tell Macleod,” Methos begged. “It would kill him.”

Joe agreed softly. “He’d try to convince all the other Immortals of the truth, and they wouldn’t believe him. They’d fight him, and he’d kill them, begging them to the end that it didn’t have to be like this. I don’t know how much of that he could take before it drove him crazy.”

“And the Watchers?”

“Don’t worry about the Watchers. I’m not going to tell them. It would start a war.” He stared down at the traffic a while longer, then turned around. “Get out.”

“Joe--”

“Everything I based my life on is a lie. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We’ll talk when I’ve had some time to think things through.”

*****

Mercifully, Adam left, staring back over his shoulder hoping for a reassuring smile from Joe. Joe had none to give. He took the bottle over to the chair and poured himself a third drink. He sat with the glass in his hands and started laughing hysterically, huge, shaking sobs.

He remembered Richie proudly tuning his motorcycle before auditions for the racing team, complaining about what a pain in the ass Mac could be. He remembered Amanda teasing him, running her fingers down his chest, laughing when he told her he only watched her do things he couldn’t get arrested for. The relief he’d felt when Mac stumbled into the bar after Michael Christian had caught him unarmed. Fitzcairn. Mei-Ling Shen. None of it was real. They were robots, golems, whatever the hell you wanted to call them. James, crazy son-of-a-bitch though he was, had been right. They weren’t human. And they didn’t even know it.

The phone rang, and Joe was surprised to see that it was already morning. “Dawson. Oh, hi Mac. No, I’m fine.” He listened and tried to clear the tightness in his throat and chest. “She left again? Well, after that showdown with Methos, I’m not surprised if she needed some space. No, I don’t know. I think he’s waiting for you to forgive him for keeping all that Horseman stuff secret.” He listened for a long time. “I guess you’re right. You never really know people. Listen, Mac, I just got in a fresh shipment for the bar, and there’s a fifty-year-old bottle of The Macallan in there. Great, I’ll see you then.”

He hung up and made his way to the bathroom for a shower. Six hours should be enough time to get himself under control. Mac would never suspect a thing. Joe was good at two things: keeping secrets and keeping friends. He’d need all his skills tonight.

End.


End file.
